Cartoonist Myron Natwick; Created Betty Boop

Myron (Grim) Natwick, the creator of the popular cartoon heroine Betty Boop, has died. He was 100.

Natwick died Sunday at Santa Monica Hospital Medical Center of pneumonia and heart disease.

“Although she was never vulgar or obscene, Betty was a suggestion you could spell in three letters: S-E-X,” Natwick said of her 60-year popularity in a Times interview earlier this year. “She was all girl.”

Growing up in Wisconsin at the turn of the century, Natwick hoped to become an illustrator for magazine and sheet music covers. He studied drawing and painting in Chicago, New York, and in Europe at the Vienna National Academy.

But on returning to the United States in 1928, he jumped into the then-burgeoning animation industry, which he had flirted with briefly at Hearst International Film Service during his student years.

Working for Max and Dave Fleischer, who had produced the famous bouncing ball sing-along “Song Cartunes,” Natwick was asked to design a girl character for the popular song by Helen Kane, “Boop-Boop-A-Doop.”

Because the only character in the Fleischers’ new sound cartoons was a little dog called Bimbo, Natwick originally drew Betty as a dog’s head on the curvaceous figure of a woman. He patterned the spit-curl flapper hairdo on Kane’s own hairstyle.

Betty first appeared as a secondary character in 1930, singing her song in a cartoon starring Bimbo and called “Dizzy Dishes.” She was so popular that the Fleischers quickly demanded more cartoons “with that girl in them.”

Natwick refined Betty, reducing her floppy dog’s ears to bangle earrings and shrinking the black nose to a button. His understanding of anatomy made her the most realistic female cartoon character of the era.

“Eight years of art school and night classes, drawing what must have been thousands of naked models, had taught me a little bit about the female body,” he told The Times. “I knew all the sexy angles and shapes, from the turn of the ankle to the shape of the heel of her shoe to where her waist belonged.”

His work with Betty led to job offers from “every cartoon studio in Hollywood.” Over the years, Natwick worked for Walt Disney’s former partner, Ub Iwerks, Disney himself, Walter Lantz, the U.S. Army (for which he made training films) and his own free-lance animation service. At Disney, he animated Snow White for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

In 1973, Richard Williams persuaded him to work on the feature “Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy,” and to teach animation to younger artists working on the film.

In that period, he did his final animation, the mad “holy Indian witch” in Williams’ feature “The Thief.”

Natwick was frequently lauded by fans and co-workers for bringing his classical training as a painter to the modern field of animation.

“I assisted Grim in 1976, when I was 18 and he was 86,” Disney animator Tom Sito recently recalled. “His experience enabled him to distill the most complex motions into a few simple lines. His drawings moved beautifully, but they looked almost like shorthand, as if he couldn’t stand to use a single superfluous line.”

Betty Boop enjoyed a comeback a few years ago, enriching Fleischer Studios and King Features Syndicate through the sale of T-shirts, videocassettes and other items. But Natwick, who had been left out when the Fleischers copyrighted his most famous character in 1930, did not share in the profits.

Natwick is survived by his daughter, Nancy Matchell of Garden Grove, and two grandsons.

Services and burial are planned in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.